As you’d expect from such a voluminous
shoot, image storage and backup were critical
issues. Whitworth had an assistant in the
field who would back up the Z 7 ’s XQD cards
once they reached capacity. In the evening,
Whit worth would organize his stills using a fairly
straightforward hierarchy: He grouped images
in a folder by location and then in subfolders
by focal length.

Step 3. Post-Production,Coffee, Coffee andMore Coffee

Post-production is where flow motion comesalive, but it’s also the most arduous piece ofWhit worth’s workflow. “Tokyo Seamless” requireda full 370 hours of post, or as Whitworth putsit, “many cups of coffee and many, many hoursstaring at computer screens.”The first step is color grading the RAW filesin Lightroom so that all the still frames havea harmonious look. Then, Whitworth usesLRTimelapse software to turn each batch ofstill frames into short video clips. From there,he says, it’s simply a matter of assemblingthose clips like you would in any videoproduction. Working in Adobe After Effects,Whitworth adds camera movements (pans andzooms, slow-motion effects, etc.) to give thetimelapse clips a more cinematic sweep. Oneof the virtues of working with a high-resolutioncamera like the Z 7, he says, is that it offersenough resolution to create pans and zooms ina single image and still have enough resolutionleft to render out an 8K video file.

For all the technical skill involved in building
flow motion videos, Whitworth says that it’s
curiosity that fuels his creation. “You need
curiosity because timelapse is really about
the world you can’t see—but your camera
can.” EDU